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A 25-year-old Brazilian video patent just expired, ending a lingering legal headache for Linux (www.xda-developers.com)
submitted 3 weeks ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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[–] 77 points 3 weeks ago* (5 children)

No.

It has never been a "legal headache", more of a bit of additional work for distro maintainers (to keep codecs separate from the rest of the distro) and a tiny inconvenience for users (they had to click an additional button after installing the distro).

Nowadays it's almost entirely irrelevant. Unless you are in a tiny minority of users who need to play DivX-encoded video (a codec which is 25 years old at this point) for some reason, you don't need to care at all.

Basically, this just made life of a few media horder nerds a tiny bit more convenient. Frankly i shouldn't be typing out a comment this long to even explain it...

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  • [–] 9 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    The one button in the installer you are remembering is actually unrelated. It's the gahnome people taking worst from winblows as usual and sticking with it after the last benefits die.

    This time it's the video codec system (instead of just using ffmpeg lul), they called it "gstreamer". If you try to install ALL gstreamer plugins, it will be some two digit gibibyte number (don't remember exactly). The button in the installer installs most popular plugins.

    Now, applications that try to use it will do anything but tell you what you are missing. Segfault, "whoopsie daisy unknown error", just hang around and so on and so forth. Chances are, it's not in dependencies either, recommended or required. One would think the ffmpeg plugin in the base set can do anything, but as it turns out it can't. For some reason.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 weeks ago

    It has never been a “legal headache”, more of a bit of additional work for distro maintainers (to keep codecs separate from the rest of the distro) and a tiny inconvenience for users (they had to click an additional button after installing the distro).

    Was that ever? Whenever someone whined about codecs back in the day, I would just install mpv or vlc (which were and are in most official distro repos I know of) and call it a day.

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